Google's Blacklist, Pt 1

Email deliverability is one of the many struggles with legit businesses offering products or services through email. ContentTech just had their online marketing summit a few weeks ago and a lot of the follow-up B2B emails from the participating vendors have ended up in the Gmail spam folder, even though it was clearly stated within the online conference that you were going to be opted into partner messages if you responded to offers or downloaded sales content.

Examples of Google's spam filter messages:

• It's similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters.
• Many people marked similar messages as spam.
• It contains content that's typically used in spam messages.

In the case of T-Mobile's career center emails, the email doesn't follow the standard practices for opting out, double opt-in, nor does it even have those options in the email's footer or any identifying marks about why the user is receiving the email. A user could have registered with T-Mobile's old career center before the MetroPCS merger; but all that language is absent from the email:

2014-03-20, T-Mobile Careers Email Screenshot

This email has only one call to action: Create a new profile. Hopefully this is just a one-time broadcast. Like with most things in life, you rarely have the opportunity to make a second impression.


In this next example, DiscoverOrg, a local business offering IT business services, also got picked up by the Gmail spam filter:

2014-03-18, DiscoverOrg prospect nurturing email

One of the biggest hurdles facing legitimate email marketers and small business is this. The email itself follows an industry standard format with all the necessary required by CAN-SPAM components. The text reads pretty well too. 

Which keywords do you think Google is referring to?